It is currently rendered using Java2D. My plan is to keep the renderer/sound/music separate so I can simply make LWJGL, GWT (webGL and pure canvas), Android variants as well. I will however make the first game an Applet/Java application with Java2D.

Now the real question is: how are you going to draw all that so it doesn't look crappy? :-)

The Java2D renderer will probably always look crappy with its flat shaded, vector graphics stuff . It might look a bit better when I add backgrounds and make the obstacles more visually varied.For the OpenGL renderer (LWJGL or WebGL), the plan is to use textures with normal maps for everything which will spice it up. I have a lot of particle effects/animations as well that I want to use for explosions, smoke etc.

Do you have any anti-crap hints for me when it comes to Java2D (and JS canvas) rendering?

Now the real question is: how are you going to draw all that so it doesn't look crappy? :-)

The Java2D renderer will probably always look crappy with its flat shaded, vector graphics stuff . It might look a bit better when I add backgrounds and make the obstacles more visually varied.For the OpenGL renderer (LWJGL or WebGL), the plan is to use textures with normal maps for everything which will spice it up. I have a lot of particle effects/animations as well that I want to use for explosions, smoke etc.

Do you have any anti-crap hints for me when it comes to Java2D (and JS canvas) rendering?

There isn't much you can do with Java2D, I'm afraid. You can make gradient fills perhaps, and anti-alias lines, but textures are mostly out of the question as far as I know.

There isn't much you can do with Java2D, I'm afraid. You can make gradient fills perhaps, and anti-alias lines, but textures are mostly out of the question as far as I know.

If by textures you mean images, Java2D is actually quite good. It can paint heaps of transformed images pretty quickly, so long as java2D lets the video card hardware accelerate, which it doesn't for many intel cards

There's radial and linear gradient paints and they're also fast with hardware accel.

A tip: One problem with java2D is that you can't do soft-clipping or anti-aliasing of images, so if you paint a rotated image it will always have jaggies on the edges. One way to make it look better is to draw a rectangle around the edge of the image in feint grey or some other translucent color to make it look less jaggy.

I would differentiate the smoke from damage from ejector thrust. Grey circles for the first and lines for the second.

Upon first glance, I thought I was seeing a top-down of Archie's jalopy as he was driving over to pickup Veronica.

Damage from ejector thrust? I had to google two times since I didn't know what Archie's jalopy was either

OpenGL will solve all the visual stuff for me eventually. In my vision I have a lot of nice looking cool explosions, weapons, backgrounds etc. that will hide the fact that it is extremely stupid to make a mass-spring based shmup

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

Exactly my first impressions! It took me a while to realize that the grey circles are just special effects when you're moving

What I meant to say (and you figured out by now) is that the grey circle special effects for thrust looks more like billowing smoke and makes me think that the ship is heavily damaged (possibly on fire) and about to fall apart--like Archie's clunker.

Nice! I love games that has procedural elements. It keeps it from getting boring and same-y, if it's done correctly I think the ones that are only composed of (2 - 3) big ellipses are ugly.. They need more shape than boring ellipses

Nice! I love games that has procedural elements. It keeps it from getting boring and same-y, if it's done correctly I think the ones that are only composed of (2 - 3) big ellipses are ugly.. They need more shape than boring ellipses

Yes, some are ugly

It is really interesting to see what can be done with different shapes. I want the friendly ships to be recognized by the shape grammar they use, for example more soft shapes or something else.

A future more tricky issue is to transform them to masses and springs while keeping them stable. Tesselation alone isn't enough

Pretty cool!! Did you use the generative and reactive music module thing? I remember seeing a thread a while back where someone showcased this amazing tool to procedurally create music.

I used my own music module, but I have also showcased it on JGO so I could be that someone Anyways, the following is a demo of the latest music module. It sounds a lot better now, but I am not satisfied yet:

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